America's religion - essay 1

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The heart of the conflict between conservatives and liberals in America is religious. Although some conservatives are not Christian and many liberals retain for various reasons a claim to Christian identity, nonetheless the claim that sets them at each other's throat is simple - simple and tremendous, because it implies a claim on the whole nation

Comments

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The first settlers certainly weren't looking for anyone else's freedom of religion but their own. Religious tyranny was as bad in early New England as in the various nations of old Europe, and declined at roughly the same pace. In Naples, the last heretic was burned in the first decade of the eighteenth century - I don't remember the exact year - and that just about gives you the idea of when religious brutality on both sides ceased to be dominant. Toleration as a principle, however, did not exist anywhere in Europe before 1783; it was more a matter of a series of ad hoc adaptations to existing realities. A king could conquer a land settled by people of a different religion and had to show his new subjects that he would not be an ogre to them; so it was when Orthodox Russia conquered Catholic Poland and Lithuania and Lutheran Latvia, Estonia and Finland. A king inherited a different crown with a separate religion; so it was when James VI of Presbyterian Scotland became James I of Anglican England. People just had to get used to it, but they did not have to like it. As a curious side note, one might notice that some of the greatest works of art of all time were the result of such misalliances. When James of Scotland came to London to reign, the Catholic Shakespeare wrote Macbeth for him; and when the Catholic king of Poland inherited the Lutheran kingdom of Saxony, the Lutheran Bach wrote the magnificent and gigantic Mass in B for him - one of the greatest works of music of all time. But until the rise of the United States, religious freedom had never been considered a value in itself.